Jeremy Lappin

Co-Founder and CEO Candex

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Jeremy Lappin is on his third technology company. He co-founded Candex in 2011 with Shani Vaza and has run it as chief executive since, building it around a problem most procurement software works around rather than solves: tail spend. Tail spend can account for as much as a fifth of an enterprise’s total purchasing while involving roughly four-fifths of its suppliers, and the cost of onboarding each of those suppliers into a procure-to-pay system usually exceeds the value of the purchase. Candex’s answer is to act as a technology-based master vendor — a single record in the buyer’s financial system through which thousands of small suppliers are engaged, tax-validated and paid. The company has raised more than $120 million, employs over 270 people across offices in New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo and Ramat Gan, and processed more than $1 billion in payments in 2025 for customers including HSBC, Sanofi, Diageo, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, Danone and Dell.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Candex in 2011 with Shani Vaza; chief executive throughout.
• Raised more than $120 million in total, including a $33 million Series C led by 9Yards Capital in July 2025 and a March 2026 extension past $40 million alongside a strategic investment from HSBC.
• Assembled an investor base spanning Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JP Morgan, American Express Ventures, Altos Ventures, Hedosophia, NFX, Craft Ventures and World Innovation Labs.
• Built Candex to over 270 employees operating in more than 50 countries, serving hundreds of Fortune 2000 enterprises.
• Founded BountyJobs in 2006, a marketplace connecting employers with headhunters, reaching roughly $20 million in revenue inside three years on $18 million raised from Greylock and Accel.
• Co-founded Versity.com in 1998, a course-management platform and student portal, raising $12 million from Venrock and exiting for a reported $80 million.

Professional Journey

Lappin started Versity.com in 1998, during the first wave of consumer internet companies aimed at university students. The product combined enterprise course-management software sold to universities with a student-facing portal, and it attracted $12 million from Venrock alongside Sigma Partners and Upfront Ventures. The business was sold for a reported $80 million.

His second company, BountyJobs, was founded in 2006 and addressed a different intermediation problem: the relationship between corporate recruiters and third-party headhunters, which had traditionally been managed through individual fee agreements and email. BountyJobs turned it into a marketplace with standardised terms and performance data. Revenue reached roughly $20 million within three years, supported by $18 million from Greylock and Accel. Lappin was speaking publicly as its founder and chief executive by 2008.

Candex, started in 2011, applies the same intermediation logic to procurement. The deliberate design choice — repeated in Lappin’s public comments — is that Candex does not ask companies to change how they buy; it fits inside the procure-to-pay process the enterprise already runs. Revenue comes from a transaction fee on purchases routed through the platform, structured comparably to card interchange, rather than from seat-based subscription pricing alone.

The company spent its first decade building the compliance machinery that makes this workable across jurisdictions: vendor validation, tax treatment and privacy handling in more than 50 countries. That regulatory groundwork is what attracted strategic investors from the banking sector. HSBC invested in March 2026 while also being a customer, and the round was framed around expanding the platform’s ability to handle high-volume supplier activity in complex regulatory environments, with Asia and the Middle East named as the next geographies.

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MBA

University of Michigan

BBA